The Land Unknown Movie Review
Three military men and the obligatory damsel in distress fly to Antarctica to investigate a strange global pattern--tropical conditions. Once there, they crash into a previously unknown part of the continent that essentially takes them back in time, all the way to the age of the dinosaurs. This 1957 film is one of many "lost in time" creature flicks of the time, and it actually isn't too bad. The acting is pretty standard--nothing fantastic, but nothing terrible. The standout would be Shirley Patterson (aka Shawn Smith) as the aforementioned damsel, Maggie Hathaway, who is not only stalked by the dinosaurs, but also by a "cave man" who has been trapped in the land for ten years, as well as a man-eating (or woman-eating, as the case may be) plant. The real stars of the film are the dinosaurs, and the hilarity of them. The behind-the-scenes story of this film is that is was intended to be a huge, high budget flick. So off the bat they spent a ton of money on a mechanical dinosaur...
this guy...
...but then they decided they spent too much money already and cut the budget significantly. This resulted in one of my new favorite characters in film history, an absolutely outstanding rubber suit T-Rex...
this guy...
...leading to more budget cuts, and the inevitable superimposed lizard doubling as a menacing dinosaur...
this guy.
Of course none of this is a terrible distraction to me as I am quite a fan of these type movies. I feel like they could have done more with "cave man", the movie has a very slow start, a poor ending, and the dinosaurs are tragically underutilized--other than that, I like this movie quite a bit and recommend it to fans of this genre.
On A Scale Of One To Ten: 6
The Land Unknown Movie Trailer (this trailer is fantastic!)
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